[Mojonation-users] Collaboration and more decentralization inMojoNation? (fwd)

[Eugene Leitl]

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 13:48:00 -0700
From: Jim McCoy <mccoy at mad-scientist.com>
Reply-To: mojonation-users at lists.sourceforge.net
To: mojonation-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Mojonation-users] Collaboration and more decentralization
    inMojo Nation?

Kannan Goundan at kannan at cats.ucsc.edu wrote:

>
> I have two questions about the concept you guys are testing in
> Mojo Nation.
>
> 1) Can you build a "web of trust" so that you aren't dependant
> on your local blacklist of rogue brokers to protect yourself?
> Possibly a "blacklist server" that people could subscribe to
> that keeps track of all the punks that it's subscribers
> reported.

Yes, such a system could be implemented.  The problem is that you need to
somehow quantify this trust to allow the agents to make useful decisions
based upon the information available to them.  Zooko presented a paper at
the last O'Reilly P2P conference on just such a subject, describing a
variant of the distributed trust metric used by Advogato.  The short answer
to this is that there are a couple of known ways to deal with this problem
but until it is really an issue it is not worth the time or effort to code
in such a distributed trust system.

> 2) Is there any way to decentralize the token server?

Not really.  You can have several competing token servers with various
exchange rates offered but this is an even harder variant of the distributed
trust problem described above.  With the tokens the distributed trust metric
starts talking about computational resources, which have some economic
value.  In this case we believe that eventually the trust would boil down to
the same sorts of questions broker of currency face when making a trading
decisions, with even less available information about the agents issuing the
tokens that a currency trader has available.  Agents would migrate towards
one or two well-trusted issuers -- there is a reason that most banks around
the world use dollars, euros, and yen as their reserve currency even if that
is not the local currency...

jim


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